Norman Foster turns 80; the Philharmonic Hall of Szczecin by Barozzi Veiga wins the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Award; Benidorm prepares its bid to be a World Heritage Site.

All About Cladding. Ever since the year 1851, when Gottfried Semper first spoke of it in the text ‘The Four Elements of Architecture,’ associating it with the textiles of primitive human constructions, the ‘cladding principle’ has been used to nuance or refute the idea – eventually turned into a modern slogan – that the form of buildings should honestly express their structures. Giovanni Fanelli and Roberto Gargiani discuss the vicissitudes of this fruitful opposition in an essay which we have retrieved specially for the occasion, followed by a selection of three buildings and three pavilions where textile cladding is interpreted almost literally: the Aspen Art Museum (USA) by Shigeru Ban, formed by a grid woven with wooden beams; the Abi Grand Theater (France) by Dominique Perrault, presenting a glass box and a veil of golden metal meshes; the Congress Center of Villanueva de la Serena (Spain) by Pancorbo, De Villar, Chacón, and Martín, with its stage box rising in the landscape like a tangle of ropes; the art installation by Marco Casagrande amid the dunes of Wenduine (Belgium), built with a warp and woof of stilts of willow wood; the pavilion raised by MASS Studies in the dormitory town of Anyang (South Korea), with its lace of white links of steel, and finally a biomimetic research pavilion designed by Achin Menges and Jan Knippers in Stuttgart (Germany), executed with threads of glass and carbon fibers.

A Foundation and an Archive. Norman Foster reveals some of the key ideas behind his career as an architect in an interview held at his foundation in Madrid, home now to a good part of his models, drawings, and plans. For their part, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have brought together their work documents in a unique archive built on the outskirts of their city, Basel.

Spaces of Conflict. Luis Fernández-Galiano reviews four books which intelligently present the paradoxes and challenges of globalization. Also: two monographs on Latin American themes – the O’Gorman House in Mexico and the work of Irmãos Roberto in Brazil – and two on the projects of Alberto Ponis in Corsica and the canonical houses of modernity.

Dossier: Structural Timber. Thanks to new processes of timber pro- duction, such as lamination and cross-lamination, which have improved their mechanical properties and made them more durable, wood-based prod- ucts are again architectural materials on their own right. Their structural applications are explained in an article by the specialist Francisco Arriaga, and illustrated by four selected buildings: a pavilion in Hokkaido (Japan) by Kengo Kuma; a hostal on the beach of Quintero (Chile) by Rudolph & Soffia; river pools in Riehen (Switzerland) by Herzog & de Meuron; and a house for elephants in Zurich by Markus Schietsch.

To close, a warning that we can only combat climate change through strate- gies involving radical political and economic actions.